That Shouldn't Stop You
by Baxaronn
Summary: Shortly after Jack's defection, he and Yusei coincidentally fall ill at around the same time.
1. Yusei

This part contains copious amounts of vomit and a few "bad words," so, take fair warning if those are things you would feel a specific way about seeing.

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><p>The day after Jack leaves, Yusei is sick. He wakes up feeling dizzy and feverish, and doesn't actually get out of bed until his roommates start pestering him about being late for something that he doesn't really remember about right now. So instead of answering them, he curls further into his blanket and turns his face towards the wall. They keep talking to him, and he keeps not answering them. Can't they tell he's sick already? He's sure he looks awful, with how bad he feels right now. Never mind that he's almost entirely hidden by blanket, and they obviously can't see him. But surely they've noticed how strange he's acting? He's completely refusing to talk to them, why isn't that enough evidence for them? Fuck. He doesn't have the energy to speak. If he did, he'd probably sound like an anthropomorphic sewage pipe. Fuck.<p>

"Mmff mmwmm," he mutters into his pillow. Mumbling is a good compromise for speaking. Yeah.

"Yusei, you're talking into your pillow," Blitz says. "We can't hear you."

"Will you just get up already?" someone else says. "We got shit to do today."

"Ugh, maybe we should leave him alone today," some third person says. Or maybe it was Blitz again. Did Blitz say anything yet? "I mean, considering what happened yesterday."

"Larry almost _drowned_ yesterday, and he's been up for hours."

"No, I mean…Jack was still his friend and shit, you know?"

"More importantly, he tried to kill a little kid and robbed the guy who stopped him."

"Yusei doesn't get depressed about stupid stuff like that! Jack is an asshole and Yusei should forget about it and wake the hell up!"

"Jack was still my friend, too…"

"Larry, tell Yusei to wake up. He'll listen to you, you're cute."

Sweet, beautiful silence follows for a handful of seconds before it is interrupted by somebody grabbing Yusei's shoulder and jerking it back and forth. "YUSEI! WAKE UP!" someone, who is probably Larry, screams directly in his ear. He knows it's Larry only because he's the only one with such a high-pitched voice who would be here. Because he's still not looking at anyone; he's watching a cockroach crawl in and out of a crack in the wall and trying to stop himself from vomiting onto his sweat-stained, naked, heavily repaired pillow. At this point he knows it would be better to just say something, but it's very hard to make himself do it when he's holding puke in his throat whilst being violently shaken.

"Stop," he says in a weak little voice. No one seems to have heard him, which is no surprise considering Larry is still screaming, but he can't speak any louder or he'll have to part his teeth. His only recourse is to swat Larry's hand away and lean out over his pillow so he can throw up without ruining his bedding.

Vomit splatters across the floor, fluid enough at first that it spreads a few inches in every direction, solid enough that it congeals almost immediately and settles into a quivering pile at the head of his bed. Yusei looks down at what just came out of him, spits one last chunk of partially digested something into the pile, and yawns. When he closes his mouth again he looks up at everyone and sees a line of four faces gaping at him. Larry, once again the most noticeable of the four, has specks of orangey stomach liquid splashed across his cheek.

"Oh…_Yusei are you okay?_" he yells. He reaches out a hand to grab Yusei by the shoulder, a motion which makes him recoil so far that he hits the back of his head against the wall. The impact for some reason makes his stomach lurch again, and he retches as if to continue vomiting, but nothing comes out. Larry babbles incoherently at him while he chokes on his own throat. "_Oh my gosh_ you're sick, or something, when did you get sick? Oh man, this is my fault…"

"Larry, cut it out. Give him some air," someone who is probably Nerve, based on his voice, says. No, no, he's looking at everyone now, he can see who's talking, and it is Nerve, and he's pulling Larry away from him by the wrist and pointing at the floor, like he's training a puppy to sit. Larry sits, on command, like the puppy Nerve is trying to train. To sit. And probably other things puppies generally learn as well. Uh huh. It's not usually so warm down here, but right now it's sweltering, for some reason. Yusei pulls his shirt off, balls it up, throws it across the room, leans over the pile and pukes again; this time with actual puke instead of just phantom puke, like twenty seconds ago.

"Oh boy, you're really fucked up, huh?" that guy who was just talking only a second ago says. "You didn't get drunk last night, did you?"

Yusei wipes his lips with the back of his hand and shakes his head no. "I woke up like this," he says. His voice is hoarse.

"Yusei, I'm sorry," Larry apologizes, hanging his head in apparent shame. "This is my fault. You're sick now because you were trying to help me, probably."

Yusei coughs a few times before answering. "What?"

"Because, because the water was really cold and you were all wet for a really long time…"

Cough. "Being wet doesn't do this," Yusei says.

"But, you almost drowned-"

"No. You almost drowned."

"Okay, but-"

"Trust me, you have nothing to do with this. I ate something bad, or something."

Larry sighs with his entire upper body. Every part of him sags forward, as though he were deflating from the back of the neck. "But _I_ gave you your food last night, so—"

"Larry, hush," says the guy who is larger than everybody else. Ugh, he's not even recognizing someone he's looking at. Wait, no, that's Taka. Man, he feels like _shit_.

"Well, I don't know what's the problem, but are you okay to go?" Blitz asks, eyeing the vomit with poorly disguised disgust. Why he feels the need to pretend vomit doesn't disgust him is beyond Yusei's comprehension, but there he is, gaping at the blob of the aforementioned vomit, periodically reaching for his nose and stopping himself the moment before he pinches it closed. "We need you to start work with us as soon as possible."

Yusei unwraps himself from his sheets and raises himself to a full upright sitting position and his vision immediately fuzzes over and he can't see anything but blurry colored splotches for several minutes. He holds his forehead in his hand and waits, and waits, and now he can see again so he puts his feet on the ground and hooks his fingers into a hole in the wall and pulls himself up. His knees shake and his vision blurs again and he sits down and covers his eyes and he doesn't think he can go to work today.

"I can't," he says. He lies down and tries to pull his sheets back up, but for some reason they won't move.

"You're lying on them." Blitz pulls him back up and grabs his sheets out from under his back. "Here."

"Are you sure you can't go?" Nerve implores, disappointment making his voice really, really irritating. "We really need the money."

"No he can't go!" Larry shrieks in his squeaky little kid voice. "He can barely even stand! He needs more _sleep_!"

"It's true, man. Just let him sleep, he'll get better faster."

"Ugh…"

"Do you need anything, Yusei?" Larry asks. His eyes are wide and his face is in so close Yusei can smell his breath. "Do you want some water? Do you need, like, a bucket or something to throw up into? Are you hungry?"

Yusei licks his lips and buries his face in his pillow. "Amm mmmf mmsm."

"What?"

He turns his head so his mouth is free and repeats himself: "All of those things."

And so Larry gets as many of those things he can find, leaves them at the foot of Yusei's bed, and heads up to the sidewalk with everyone else. Yusei's pile of vomit stays where it is until they get back at the end of the day and remember to clean it up for him.

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><p>Go to part two, when it's up, which should be almost immediately after part 1 is up, which it is, or else how would you be reading this sentence.<p> 


	2. Jack

Part 2!

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><p>A week after Jack arrives, he's sick. He wakes up in the morning with a mild headache and a stuffy nose, and he'd prefer to keep sleeping, but he's expected to keep a specific schedule which he probably shouldn't mess with so early on in his stay here. So he gets up anyway and heads to that freakishly large bathroom to wash his face. That should help him wake up a bit, because it's not happening on it's own and he feels like a zombie, and also he probably has drool stains on his cheek, if his nose has been this stuffy for any length of time while he was sleeping.<p>

Every time he enters this bathroom he is struck by how huge it is. Seriously, it's bigger than some homes he's been in. And it's supposed to be exclusively his, so he doesn't even have to think about which of the seven washcloths sitting out for him he takes, as they all belong to him and him alone. He drowns one in perfectly temperature controlled water, squeezes it out and runs it over his face, and for a fraction of a second his sinuses feel empty. But the heat of the damp fabric dissipates pretty much as soon as he experiences it and he feels crappy again within moments.

As he expected, tracks of dried saliva run from both corners of his mouth and disappear behind his ears. He didn't know he moved that much in his sleep. Well, anyway, he removes them, with the washcloth, instead of by scraping them away with his fingernails like he did three days ago. He's not sure why that blue haired woman was even paying attention, but that irritated her for some Neo Domino city reason, so he figures he may as well try and stop doing that, if for no reason other than to avoid being told off for bad hygiene again. Is it unhygienic not to shave every day? His hair is light enough that no one will notice his stubble unless they're looking for it, right? And what are cotton swabs for?

Eventually he decides he won't care about any of these things unless someone tells him to and goes to the other freakishly enormous room that serves as a dining area, wherein boss guy and blue hair are waiting for him at the comparably small table. He sits down in the seat opposite from Godwin and puts his elbows on the table so he can prop up his face with his hands. He stares into space for a while until he hears Godwin clear his throat for the third time, which apparently means he's trying to call for attention.

"It's bad manners to have two elbows on a dining room table," Godwin says, as soon as he catches Jack's eye.

Jack puts one of his arms down. Godwin smiles a satisfied smile. "Thank you. Do you want any breakfast?" he asks, himself holding a small cup of some kind of coffee and sitting in front of a plate of toast and an egg in a cup. He's eating an egg out of a cup. He has a cup that is specifically made for eating eggs out of. It serves no other purpose. Jack grunts away the offer and stares into space some more.

Godwin looks at him with a raised eyebrow. "Is something the matter, Jack?" he asks. "You look a bit off. When did you wake up?"

"Nothing. I'm kinda sick, I guess."

Godwin's smile slips into a frown, his eyebrows cave in and his head cocks slightly, almost imperceptibly to the side. "Sick? In what way?" he asks.

Jack scratches his scalp and sniffs some loose mucus back into his sinuses. "I have a cold or something," he says, rubbing his nose with his knuckle like he's trying to point out where the problem is. He assumes that that will be the end of the conversation, but for some reason Godwin still cares, as evidenced by the increased intensity of his frown. "What?"

"Well, that's no good," Godwin says, as if he's pointing out something insightful. Blue haired woman whose name Jack still can't remember looks up from something she's reading and blinks. Specifically blinks. Like, she blinks at the conversation. She noticeably blinks.

"You should probably go back to bed after breakfast," Godwin continues.

"Huh?"

"Well, if you're sick, you should rest as much as possible. You'll recover faster that way."

Jack raises an eyebrow. "Aren't I supposed to be doing something today?"

"You were going to have a practice duel with someone today, but it can be rescheduled," Godwin says. "Mikage, switch the date to next week and tell Dipaolo not to come in today."

Mikage, that was her name, hurriedly whips out some electronic device from her coat pocket and projects a screen in the air in front of her. She drags one square of a calendar onto another one, duplicates the screen two times and shoves them around the table so everyone can see what she's done. "Does that seem like a fair estimate?" she asks, question entirely directed at her boss. Godwin looks to Jack for the answer, however, as _he's _the one who is sick, he'd probably know better how long it will take for him to recover. Jack rolls his eyes and drags the square back where it was.

"I'm fine to play a _card game_, I'm not that sick," he insists. "And even if I was, it wouldn't take me a week and a half to get better. I don't suck nearly that much."

Crestfallen, Mikage sags her shoulders and locks her eyes on a small spot on the dining mat that separates her bowl of granola from the table. The mats are blue with white filigree borders, and every seat, occupied or not, has one in front of it. Godwin smiles and moves the calendar square back to its revised position. "Of course not. But surely you don't want your performance to suffer for any reason?"

"My performance won't suffer because of a _cold_."

"Not significantly, to be sure, but no one is perfectly on their game if they're sick."

"Isn't it more of a pain in the ass to change your schedule than for me to just do it today?"

Godwin chuckles into the back of his glove and takes a small sip from his tiny coffee cup. "The point, Jack, is that you don't _have_ to do it. If you're sick, that's a perfectly valid reason to skip out. You're not gaining anything by making yourself look fallible to the people watching you." He leans back in his chair and takes another miniscule sip from his miniscule cup, emerging from his beverage with that same satisfied smirk he's been wearing semi constantly since Jack met him, probably earlier.

Jack blows his nose into a napkin.

"Jack, those are dining table napkins, you can't blow your nose with them!" Mikage snaps, broken from her embarrassed reverie by the sound of his apparent social misconduct. "You have to use either a disposable paper tissue or a handkerchief!"

"This is stupid," Jack says, throwing the napkin onto the floor and pushing his chair out so he can stand up again.

Godwin looks vaguely disappointed. "You're leaving? Are you sure you don't want anything to eat?"

Instead of answering Jack turns around and storms out of the room. The last thing he hears is Godwin imploring Mikage to calm down, please, and not worry so much about his behavior. "He's a teenager, they all act like that. You were that young fairly recently, you know what I mean."

Annoyed that something so minute as dirtying a piece of cloth is such a big fucking deal, Jack goes back to that freakishly enormous room that serves as his "sleeping quarters" to sulk for the rest of the day. Mikage comes around several times asking him through the door if he needs anything, and even though he never does she still doesn't piss off like he wants her to before listing everything she's thought of to offer every single time she comes. Not that he's telling her he doesn't want anything, as an important part of sulking is refusal to communicate, but his silence really should suggest to her that he doesn't want to engage with her in any way. Why doesn't she get that?

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><p>So didja like it? If so, please tell me. I'm so lonely.<p> 


End file.
